Complaining about the lack of facilities on the radar project

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BERNARD LOVELL

14 - Complaining about the lack of facilities on the radar project

There was known to be a trouble with this equipment, not only that it was very poorly made, but the very fact that it was working on two long wavelengths, because the transmitting aerials, transmitting and receiving aerials were- had a very broad beam and one immediately got solid ground returns from whatever height you might be flying at. If you were flying at 10,000 feet, which was quite high for a Blenheim, then for any range greater than 10,000 feet, the system was completely blocked by ground returns, therefore the great thing was to find some means of working on a much shorter wavelength. And Blackett, sorry Bowen said to me- Look we want you to work on finding how to make a transmitter on a much shorter wavelength than 1.5 metres. Well, I absolutely knew nothing about it. And there was no library, there was no workshop, this was just an open hanger, and it soon transpired that I was- so in fact what actually happened, I did a lot of testing with the old equipment and made some rather vague progress with trying to think and devise how one would use- devise a narrower beam and I’m afraid I wrote a letter to Blackett complaining about the lack of facilities in what was supposed to be a matter of the highest priority. Well, I complained that there was no workshop, no facilities, no library and that the constant changes of instructions from high levels to Bowen, as to whether what type of aircraft he must use. It was first of all to be short nosed and then long nosed and this made an enormous difference to the type of aerials. Well, unknown to me, Blackett had sent my letter to Tizard and again, completely unknown to me, Tizard had sent my letter to Rowe, who was then in Dundee and was really the superintendent of the whole lot. I did not know until very, very much later that Tizard never destroyed any letters and that he had kept Blackett’s letter and it is now and I saw it, for reasons I will mention later on, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, and I did not know that I had put my thumb so to speak on a very sore point. Tizard had already suspected that things were not right with this development and I- this caused- I learnt much later on that although it did not affect me then, that quite a revolution at high levels.